TUSK: Zombies are among us ... and that’s OK!

By Mark Hughes Cobb,Tusk Editor

Friday

Mar 27, 2009 at 12:01 AM

Sean Hoade, a University of Alabama English instructor who’s taught a popular interim course titled “Zombies! The Living Dead in Literature, Film and Culture,” has long been a science-fiction and horror fan.

If zombies seem to be everywhere nowadays, well, that’s kind of the point. They’re the villain that multiplies like a virus, an undead, cannibalizing monster swarming by numbers, relentlessness and self-replication, not reliant on intellect, strength, charm or skill.Zombies may be, after the Titanic, the world’s second-largest metaphor.Sean Hoade, a University of Alabama English instructor who’s taught a popular interim course titled “Zombies! The Living Dead in Literature, Film and Culture,” has long been a science-fiction and horror fan, but “wouldn’t consider myself a supergeek on it.”But then he watched the 2004 remake of “Dawn of the Dead,” and realized he was more scared of zombies than any ghost, vampire or werewolf.So he dug into the fear.“Being an academic, I realized there’s a lot of subtext there,” Hoade said. In what he laughingly terms “retroactive plagiarism,” he found many had written on the topics before he began, about how the zombie in pop culture reflects racial, sexual, religious and family tensions, among others.Unlike vampires, werewolves, ghosts and witches, which have deep roots in human mythology, zombies are a relative newcomer to the monster scene, although revenants, something like vengeful ghosts, and the “draugr” of medieval Norse mythology, might be related. William Buehler Seabrook’s 1929 book “Magic Island” introduced the western world to the Vodou practices of Haiti, in which corpses were said to be reanimated by a sorcerer, and used as common laborers. The 1932 movie “White Zombie,” with Bela Lugosi, was based loosely on tales from “Magic Island,” as was a stage play of the same name.Occasional movies followed over the decades, but the undisputed progenitor of the modern zombie is director George Romero, who introduced zombies to cannibalism with his landmark “Night of the Living Dead.”“In 1968, you’ve got Romero and his friends smoking pot in this old farmhouse, making a movie for $100,000, and they start thinking, ‘What is the most attention-grabbing, shocking thing we could have our monsters do?’” Hoade said. The movie ratings code had just come into being, meaning that, assuming you were willing to bear the R or X, you could get away with, well, murder, of the most gruesome kind.“So you’ve got the zombie eating her dead mother, which brings in the incest thing, the cannibalism taboo, matricide ... you’ve got everything,” Hoade said.Romero and company, searching among friends for the best actor, hit on Duane Jones to play the hero, Ben. Jones happened to be black.“But there’s no mention of his race at any time,” Hoade said. “In the script, the most competent, reliable, with-it person, wearing a cardigan and Florsheim shoes, just happens to be black. So the zombie movie just happened to become more explicitly about race.”On the ugly side, zombies reflect racist fears: The mob that outdoes the “superior” group by virtue of relentless behavior. “They’ve not very fast, they’re not very smart, but the thing they can do is replicate very quickly,” Hoade said. “It doesn’t take any skill, it’s just animalistic: They bite somebody.“What it reflects on, the living become this elite. We can think, we can do all the creative things the zombies can’t. But the zombies quickly outnumber us through their sheer, if you want to call it, breeding. It’s clearly analogous to what the white supremacists say: ‘They’re less than us, but they’re going to overpower us by their sheer numbers. They will get you by outnumbering you; they will surround you.’”Zombies contain, in one being, the ideas of Eros and Thanatos, the Greek embodiments of lust and death, respectively.“You literally have the bodies of others erotically charged to you,” Hoade said. “We get attracted to people, but the zombie idea perverts this. They will pursue you more than any lover would. They will get to know your flesh much more intimately than any lover could. “You literally, if you think about it, become one with this other. They physically make you part of them.”That leads to even more disturbing thoughts when a loved one gets bitten.“If you have someone who is literally your lover before she’s turned into a zombie, she’s still her, but she’s not her. When you become a lover with someone, you basically give them access to your body. Do you rescind that when they become a zombie? I think you probably should,” Hoade said, laughing.But he notes that’s how many zombie horrors work: By showing survivors reacting to loved ones who have turned on them.“She’s not your mother anymore, but she still looks and feels the same, mostly, to you,” Hoade said. “That’s the uncanny. That’s why Freud says it’s such a sometimes devastating experience to go back to your hometown when you’ve been away for many years.“Zombies fit into that wish we sometimes have, that a dead loved one could return. OK, they’re not dead anymore... but they’re worse.”Zombie movies help audiences reflect on ideas about civilization collapsing in a way that’s strangely relatable, and still enjoyable.“Like in ‘Dawn of the Dead,’ you’ve got a small group of survivors fighting for their lives in a shopping mall,” Hoade said, alluding to yet another zombie metaphor, eating human flesh translates to rampant human consumerism. “That’s fun. “But compared that to a movie like ‘The Day After,’ about nuclear war. That’s not fun! That could happen.“So it’s a safe way to think about the end of the world, and also a safe way to think about death, in its natural state [of mortification]. There’s a curiosity about that throughout most of human history, but our culture has sort of kept that hidden away, which I’m fine with,” Hoade said, laughing.Before the zombies stopped lumbering and started running — the so-called “zoombies” of the 1978 “Dawn of the Dead” — the key to zombie success was their simplicity. As Max Brooks wrote in his hit 2003 book, “The Zombie Survival Guide,” zombies don’t stop to shave, sleep or eat.“But you ARE dinner,” Hoade said. “You have to stop. You have your human limitations.”Zombies are limited, too, of course, which explains why they’re just now reaching literature, after decades of success in movies (including more whimsical adaptations of recent years, such as the 2004 “Shaun of the Dead” and Troma Films’ 2008 “Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead,” starring Tuscaloosa-born actor Kate Graham) videogames (the Resident Evil and Doom series, among others) and comics.“The only other fictional zombie novel that I know of is ‘World War Z,’ by Max Brooks,” said Seth Grahame-Smith, author of the newly released collaboration with Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” “Mine is without a doubt the first foray for zombies into classical literature.“One of the problems is, and I guess Mary Shelley (author of ‘Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus’) found a way to get around this, zombies don’t talk. And because they don’t talk, they’re this big monolithic problem that stumbles across the countryside until somebody shoots enough of them in the brain.“You can’t reason with them, you can’t write dialogue for them. Basically all you can do is chop their heads off or run away from them.”In films, you can get away with such lack of acumen by focusing on the visual splendor of a dripping corpse chowing on a meaty thigh.And of course, the metaphors.“Romero used them to symbolize everything from Vietnam to consumerism,” Grahame-Smith said. “They’ve always been used to comment on the social ills of the day, but they don’t DO much. They’re really single-minded, but they’re not doing it out of hate, not doing it out of spite. This is a virus.”Which leads to yet another zombie metaphor, for the potential fallout of ugly warfare.But is the zombie, as one blogger suggested, the new vampire?“I think vampires are still the new vampires,” Grahame-Smith said. “There’s going to be three more ‘Twilight’ movies in the next years.”Hoade believes the current spate of zombie novelty literature — “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” Brooks’ “The Zombie Survival Guide” — will lead to new, more serious fiction on zombies, focusing, as the most zombie pop does, on the survivors and not the monsters themselves.“It could be a serious examination of what it would mean to live in a world of zombies,” he said. “And ‘World War Z’ was an excellent example of this; it took it really seriously. Humans had a war with zombies, and we almost lost, but there are still zombies. What would life be like knowing there’s always that threat?”Like say ‑ rolling metaphor alert ‑ living in a world with the sword of terrorism hanging over your heads?Our current financial troubles, seemingly bleak and endless, could mean happy days for zombies and other monsters, Hoade said. “That’s the time when escapist literature really takes off,” he said. “When we have a war, technology benefits. When we have financial depressions, artistic creativity seems to take off.“Now that the zombie infestation has spread to public-domain novels, next thing you’re going to have movies based on those novels. ‘City Lights’ with zombies? ‘Rachel Getting Buried’?” he said, laughing.“It’s going to be fun getting there, whatever it is.”

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